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Three priests with Hudson Valley ties were among 300 from six Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania who sexually abused more than 1,000 children, according to a grand jury report released Tuesday.

"We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have heard some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church," the document says.

"But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere."

The more than 1,300-page
report
lists several priests with assignments in the Hudson Valley, including:

Reverend Austin E. Flanagan: The associate medical director of St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center in
Harrison
wrote a letter to Bishop James C. Timlin. The letter said that approximately one month prior to his admission to St. Vincent's Hospital, he had been questioned about fondling two boys at a summer camp two years earlier.

"As a consequence of the coverup, almost every instance of abuse we found is too old to be prosecuted. But that is not to say there are no more predators," the report says.

"This grand jury has issued presentments against a priest in the Greensburg diocese and a priest in the Erie Diocese, who has been sexually assaulting children within the last decade. We learned of these abusers directly from their dioceses - which we hope is a sign that the church is finally changing its ways. And there may be more indictments in the future; investigation continues."